A year of Covid-19: looking back at the pandemic in Catalonia

First patient was diagnosed on February 25, 2020 in Barcelona

A health professional at Barcelona's Hospital del Mar (by Laura Fíguls)
A health professional at Barcelona's Hospital del Mar (by Laura Fíguls) / Cristina Tomàs White

Cristina Tomàs White | Barcelona

February 25, 2021 10:34 AM

On February 25, 2020, and after weeks of watching the virus spread from afar, Covid-19 was no longer a distant worry in Catalonia: a 36-year-old Italian woman who had returned to Barcelona from a trip to northern Italy had tested positive for the virus.

Raquel González Urria, one of the nurses at the Catalan capital's Hospital Clínic that treated her, remembers this moment well.

"I was at home, I got a call, there was uncertainty, nobody knew what was coming," González Urria recalls, although she did feel a sense of relief knowing the woman was doing well clinically. "We were calm because she was a patient not at risk of developing serious symptoms," she says.

The date also carries special significance for Daniel Camprubí, one of the doctors at the same hospital who, alongside González Urria and others, cared for Catalonia's first coronavirus patient.